It’s time to check out the California homestead numbers for 2026.
The 2021 expanded California homestead not only brought the exemption amount closer to the real cost of housing, it provided for annual adjustments for inflation. The original legislation created a $300,000 floor on the exemption and a $600,000 cap for homeowners, based on the median price of a home in the county.
The homestead exemption protects equity in a principal residence, irrespective of the overall fair market value of the home.
Exactly where your exemption falls between the floor and the cap depends on the median price of a home in the county in which you live.
So it’s time to pull out the calculator and see what the new year holds. I’ve calculated the 2026 Californa homestead exemptions and here’s what I found:
2026 cap $743,459
2026 floor $371,547
Beware the rounding
I found myself at odds with one of the trustees in my district on the amount of the 2024 homestead exemption. Her number was $5 lower than the number I had calculated. Going back over the math, it turns out that the difference lay in how many decimal places one used in the calculation. She had rounded the inflation number to two decimal places; I had carried it out to three.
Expect then that the difference between the approaches may widen depending on which number you use to calculate next year’s cap and floor.
Do it yourself
If you’re inclined to check my work, I laid out how to calculate the homestead change and find the data sources in an earlier post. That post relied on the always meticulous work of San Jose bankruptcy lawyer Norma Hammes.
Whence the home value numbers
What the legislature forgot was to provide an authoritative source for the median price of homes in the county. The statute CCP 704.730 reads:
The countywide median sale price for a single-family home in the calendar year prior to the calendar year in which the judgment debtor claims the exemption, not to exceed six hundred thousand dollars ($600,000)
The most comprehensive source of sales by county seems to be the California Association of Realtors
But in a data set displayed by month, is “the sale price…in the calendar year prior..”
- the average of the prices in the past year?
- the median of the prices each month?
- the value in the month of filing a year ago?
- the year-end median?
As far as I’ve seen, no court has opined on the issue. Not to mention the issue of what county’s number applies when a former resident of California uses the CA exemptions to protect real estate in another state.
More
How the annual change is calculated
